Olympics: New fears over British bid

by IAN CHADBAND, Evening Standard

Britain's athletics chiefs fear that a decision to scrap the planned national athletics stadium in north London will destroy any prospect of the capital staging both the world athletics championships and the Olympic Games.

Officials of UK Athletics say they have not yet had any confirmation of weekend reports that plans for the £87 million stadium at Picketts Lock have been definitively shelved but, privately, they believe they could hear the bad news later this week.

Yet they were still clinging to the hope that the government, faced with huge embarrassment over the prospect of the 2005 world athletics championships being moved to another country, would be forced to hammer out another solution to enable the event to still be staged in Britain.

"If Britain was seen by the international sports community to be incapable of staging the world championships, then the knock-on effect for domestic sport could be calamitous," one senior British athletics official told Standard Sport last night.

"If Britain doesn't stage the world championships, then I think you can forget about London hosting the Olympics in 2012."

A government-ordered enquiry into the Picketts Lock project, conducted by businessman Patrick Carter, is said to have concluded that the stadium in Edmonton would cost much more than originally thought and could prove a waste of millions of pounds of public money.

The stadium was to have staged the world championships in four years time but British athletics officials are resigned to the fact that, if the 43,000-seater stadium project has been scrapped, there is no chance of the event being held anywhere else in London.

Venues like Wembley and Crystal Palace have already been ruled out as possible alternatives by all parties.

Any prospect of persuading the International Association of Athletics Federations to stage the event elsewhere in Britain - Manchester, Sheffield and Gateshead have all been mentioned as possible sites - also seem doomed to failure because the IAAF have become so disenchanted with the continual uncertainty surrounding the bid.

The IAAF warned last night that it could invite new bids to stage the competition, with Berlin, Tokyo and Sydney reportedly ready to step in, and domestic officials are privately resigned to accepting that any further British bid in the wake of a farce over Picketts Lock would be almost certainly rejected out of hand.

But while officials wait for an official announcement about the future of the project, expected later in the week, they will hope to discuss their case with IAAF President Lamine Diack and general secretary Istvan Gyulai, who will be in England for the world half-marathon championships in Bristol this weekend.